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Seventeen
Lodestar
Fuck.
Just…fuck.
I stared at the code, started at the fucking Trojan Horse I’d let infect my hardware, and I growled under my breath.
I was rarely bested as a hacker, rarely as in never. I wouldn’t let this prick gangbanger get the best of me, but I didn’t have time to set malware on his ass, not with Katina here. I’d diverted his spyware and scareware, but that fucking Trojan? Nestled in a goddamn email from Child Services?
Yeah, he’d got me.
He’d got me good.
Motherfucker.
I was too hard to panic, and ordinarily I wouldn’t give a shit. I’d survived Kembesh, had endured more fucking shit at the hands of my superior officers than any made man dick could wish to torture me with, but Katina?
She’d been through enough.
And she’d just started sleeping.
Fuck.
Fuck!
I didn’t have time to move, didn’t have time to isolate the issue.
Staring at the screens as my programs worked on flushing out the malware, I knew I had about three hours before they’d find my IP address. I’d never seen a Trojan like it, and God help me, I wanted to figure it out so I could dismantle it. Normally, that was what I’d do.
I’d take it apart, put it back together again, then use it in my repertoire.
But Katina changed shit.
When it was just me, I’d pick up the one laptop I never left home without, pack a rucksack, and take off, the open road my home for the foreseeable future.
With Katina, I needed to provide an address for state welfare to find me. To check up on me.
I didn’t like it, but…
Digging my fingers into my eyes, I racked my brain, going over my next options.
The second Kat’s social worker showed up and we weren’t here, she’d pull an Amber Alert, which meant I needed to be somewhere the cops didn’t go…
I rifled through my memory like it was an index card box, shoving cards aside where I stored tidbits of information on them for a later date. Things were a little messy inside and had been ever since Katina had come into my life.
That little kid had ruined my world in more ways than one, but I didn’t have it in me to dislike her for it. She’d lost her mom, her dad, then her sister, and me? I was on the hunt for that sister.
I fucking refused to let that sweet little kid lose everything.
That was how I’d tapped into the Five Points’ systems. I was on the hunt for some scum-sucking, Hitler wannabes who were selling women like they were chickens at a market.
I mean, as a vegan, selling chickens sucked too, but this was a thousand times worse.
Just thinking about it made my heart start to pound with outrage.
But like that was the key, I thought about someone else who usually pissed me off.
